Friday, August 04, 2017

Mulling over 125 years of mystery: the Lizzie Borden murders

I hesitate to invoke the rhyme
because it's been so overused (and is so tasteless) but it really is the best
and most succinct summary of the events of August 4, 1892:

Lizzie Borden took an ax,

Gave her mother forty whacks,

And when she saw what she had
done,

She gave her father forty-one.

Lizzie Borden, acquitted of
murdering her (step)mother and father with a hatchet, was found guilty in the
court of public opinion. Schoolchildren taunted her with the rhyme as she
continued living in the small town of Fall River, Massachusetts (albeit in a
much nice home, purchased with the funds she and her sister inherited upon
their wealthy father’s death). They rang her doorbell at all hours and ran,
screaming, before she could open it. They threw rocks at her windows.

Perhaps worse—since children’s
thoughtless cruelty is a given—carriage drivers would meet the train coming in
to Fall River and charge a fee to drive past Lizzie’s home, park outside, and
loudly narrate the details of the crimes, which she surely heard through her
walls.

Those details were horrific, such
that her 1893 trial was considered the first “trial of the century.” Every
major newspaper sent a reporter to sit in the crowded New Bedford courthouse
and jot down each nuance of emotion that crossed her face.

The back of Abby Borden’s skull
bore 19 blows, evidence of uncontrollable rage. It came out through forensics
that she must have faced her attacker and known her fate: one poignant blow was
on her forehead. Mrs. Borden had been killed first in an upstairs room and lay
cooling for several hours until her husband Andrew came home from his morning
tasks and lay down for a nap on the sitting room couch. The murderer attacked
him while he slept.

His skull showed 10 or 11 cuts,
roughly half of his wife’s, but proof that the killer was still furious hours
later. Both skulls were displayed in court to show jurors the reality of that
anger. They had been rendered down to bone by a doctor who boiled them,
according to the later report of his young son who was upset at the morbid
activity in his own kitchen. The Borden corpses had been secretly beheaded,
without the daughters’ permission, during a second autopsy at a cemetery
holding structure. The first had been performed in the Borden home’s dining room.
Lizzie fainted in court when tissue covering the skulls drifted to the floor,
prematurely revealing their placement in the doctor’s satchel. A juror was
overcome by the crime scene photographs that testimony paused while peers tried
to revive him. The facts of the case—and the murders of the elderly
couple—proved uneasy to talk about.

What was Lizzie so upset about, if
she was indeed the killer? Reputedly, her father’s miserliness, his spending
money on his wife’s family, and probably general indignation that she would
spend life as a spinster trapped in that house. Her oldest sister hadn’t
married, and suitors were few and far between for Lizzie. It didn’t help that
that August was insanely hot in an era before air-conditioning, that she had
her period in an era before ibuprofen, and that a hated uncle showed up for a
visit while her sister was away visiting friends.

Whatever the motive, the
intervening 125 years have spawned dozens of books, several movies (including
one to be released this year, with indie-movie goddess Chloe Sevigny playing
Lizzie, and Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame playing the Irish maid Bridget
Sullivan), and an incredible volume of speculation. Similar to O.J. Simpson,
who is to be released on probation, Lizzie Borden faced a nation that suspected
the jurors had been hoodwinked.

Visit the Lizzie Borden house in
Fall River today and you’ll see crime scene reenactments, tours of the home and
hear authors talk about the case. Its mystery endures.

Erika Mailman is the author of The Murderer’s
Maid: a Lizzie Borden Novel, which looks at the case from the point of view of
Bridget Sullivan, the only other person in the house that day besides Lizzie
and her parents.

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About Me

I write historical novels. The Witch's Trinity is about medieval witchcraft, Woman of Ill Fame is about a Gold Rush prostitute, and House of Bellaver is about a haunted 1800s house museum. The Murderer's Maid: a Lizzie Borden Novel tells the American legend from the point of view of the maid Bridget Sullivan.
I'm fascinated by a lot of stuff and blog about it: history, road trips, suffrage, museums, the Gold Rush, witchcraft, murder, Victorians, cursed Egyptian tombs.